Below is a video called “Why Jesus Created Art” from a Resurgence conference. It includes Don Clark, from Invisible Creature, Jesse Bryan, Creative Director at Mars Hill, and two members of August Burns Red. If you have 45 minutes, it’s well worth a watch. There’s a lot of great stuff in there, but I’ve pulled out a couple of the highlights for me below.

On jealousy…
“If have a hard time seeing other people succeed or look at other people’s work and then get upset about it, what that really means is you are valuing creativity and your work over the cross. So it’s not a character default. It’s sin.” – JB (8:25)

“Because of the cross, we can now take these gifts, bounce them back up to Him as worship, not as sacrifice. Huge difference. He doesn’t take sacrifices any more.” – JB (9:45)

On Christians borrowing/copying culture’s art…
“What you have to see here is that a lot of people see this stuff and say “Oh, this is cute.” It’s not cute. It’s dark. Because when you look at this, what they’re really saying is Jesus needs my help…You think way too highly of yourself if you think it’s your job to sanitize everything for Jesus.” – JB (12:20)

“Being an artist is not a higher calling that being a Christian.” (17:00)

“The big idea here is that God will love you whether or not you get any better.” – JB (19:05)

“We get questions on how can we get more followers like you guys, twitter followers, and blog… We’re not seeking that. We’re creating the stuff that we want to create and it’s opening a door to an audience that wants to see our stuff.” – DC (26:30)

“All I want to do is make honest work. And it has to be a representation of Jesus Christ.” – DC (34:00)

“What happens in the church is, everybody talks about how to make Jesus relevant. If I need to explain to you that you don’t make Jesus relevant, we’ve got a big issue. Jesus makes you relevant.” – JB (37:15)

So some days I need to just think for a little while. Normally, I keep it to myself because it’s incoherent drivel, but a lot of times, I’ll find myself going back and rethinking the same topic without any real progress made. That’s mostly because I have no record of the last time I thought about it. Make sense? Didn’t think so.

Anyway, I’m literally writing this as a stream of consciousness (no editing, no nothing) so good luck actually reading it. If you’re interested in some of my thoughts on God and Creativity, read on. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it though.

So I want to start with this verse…

Ecclesiastes 1:9-10
What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun. Can one say about anything, “Look, this is new”? It has already existed in the ages before us.

and this definition…

Create -
1. to cause to come into being, as something unique that would not naturally evolve or that is not made by ordinary processes.
2. to evolve from one’s own thought or imagination, as a work of art or an invention.

The tension between these two things has always been pretty apparent to me. I fully believe the Bible, and yet, I still have this incredible yearning to create something new. Then, for me, I’ve got this other part of my head that analyzes everything and says, “Hold on, there’s an inherent problem if you want to do something you don’t believe can be done.” Things don’t really add up without something more.

I’ll start at the beginning. God is the creator. For me, there’s no question about that. I think it takes just as much faith to believe that all this came from nothing as it does to believe in a divine creator, but that’s a whole different issue. So, for this, God is the creator.

God created me. He created me with a purpose and with desires. One of the purposes He gave me is to glorify him. One of the desires he gave me is to create something new.

I believe that when I create, God is working through me to reveal something that I didn’t see before. I don’t necessarily believe that I’m making anything new, just that I’m seeing something new.

I watched an interview last week with JT from Paper Route and in it, he said something along the lines of…

I guess I love to write/create because maybe, that’s the only time I truly believe in God.

I think there’s something to that. It’s hard for me to even imagine really, truly believing in God without seeing a lot of the creative things that I have. There are times when a song lyric or melody reaffirms my belief in God. There are times when I see a painting or a piece of architecture, and I think God had to have something to do with that.

Ben Sollee has a song that I’ve always found interesting, and I’ve never really known why. He meets God and has a conversation with him. It ends with this…

I saw God on the mountain
Tearing at the sky
I saw God on the mountain
With tears in his eyes

He said; ‘Son,
I used to know where I put things,
I used to know
I could have shown you all the beauty in the world
but now I need you to show me
Yes, show me’

I don’t think God has forgotten where He put the beauty He created. I do think he’s waiting on us to show it to him though. Every day, I see something new and beautiful. A lot of times, I see it in things that I’ve seen a million times before.

I think God has created a lot more than we see, but He’s waiting on us to reveal it to each other.

At one point in my life, I looked at creativity as thing that I could compete at. I could be more creative than another guy and he could be more creative than me, but now I realize creativity is about collaboration.

It’s about a musician and a painter and a gardener and a builder doing what they can to reveal God to each other and to the world.

That’s how I reconcile the fact that nothing’s new with the definition of creation. For me, I think it should become much less about my creation and more about His revelation.

So, remember when I wrote this post about Born of Water a couple of months ago? No? I didn’t expect you to, but I promised that they would be releasing some new music soon. That time has come.

Today, they release their first EP, The Wanderer. I’m openly biased, so I’m not going to share my thoughts on the album with you quite yet. I want you to make your own judgments.

All you have to do is head over to www.bornofwater.com where you can stream the whole thing and download it for whatever you want to pay (that includes nothing). I know these guys like brothers, and the most important thing to them is not making money, but having as many people listen to and collaborate on this project as possible.

Collaborate? Yes, you can submit your own Born of Water inspired projects. Below are four that I did. All you have to do is create it and send it to info@bornofwatermusic.com and we’ll take some of them and post them on the site.

Follow @_BornOfWater on Twitter or like them on Facebook. Also, be sure to follow Tom and Jon on Twitter.

To listen to even more of their music, head over to their music page..

To see more Born of Water art by different artists, head over to their art gallery page..